


Frailty

by framboise



Category: A Discovery of Witches (TV), All Souls Trilogy - Deborah Harkness
Genre: (also this follows canon in that there is a Matthew/Diana endgame), Brooding, Canon Related, Character Study, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Multiple Pairings, Pre-Canon, Single POV, This is an unholy mix of tv/book canon and my imagination, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 05:44:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16212650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/framboise/pseuds/framboise
Summary: "My Matthew was drawn to that delicacy, I suppose. He has always liked fragile things."





	Frailty

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not totally sure what this is, except something of a character study of Matthew in various pairings. I've been enjoying Matthew and Diana's love story in the show, and in what I've read of the books (I'm a quarter of the way through book 2 at the moment), but I fancied exploring what he might have been like with other women in his past too, using the quote from Ysabeau in book 1 about his love of "fragile things" as a starting point. I make no claims that this is canon-compliant characterisation of any of the characters involved but I hope it's still interesting!
> 
> **This fic references events at the end of book 1 that presumably will be in a later episode of season 1, so a warning for spoilers.

* * *

 

 

 

When he takes Diana to the Old Lodge, he feels dizzy at her scent, her witches' blood, mingling with all the other scents lingering in his belongings from years and decades and centuries ago. He shows her some of what he owns, some of the dusty rooms, but not all. She has a historian's hunger for his past and he shies away from it as much as it also thrills him to have her so fascinated.

In one of the locked rooms he does not open, he has a collection of curiosities, as all good Victorian men of his supposed class once did, and every time he looks at them they become even more macabre to behold. He had been taken in by the lepidopterist craze along with the best of them, and had once owned frames and frames of carefully pinned butterflies, their wings stiffened and still.

 _They remind one of youth, of women, do they not_ , one man had said to him as he attended an auction, the fug of pipe smoke doing little to cover the scent of men with their bloods up.

 _Yes_ , Matthew had replied, inclining his head, but he did not say that they also reminded him of all warmbloods, their fluttering lives so short.

 

 

Bianca, his wife when he was only a human, had been young, fragile, pale and pretty. When he thinks of her now he thinks of her heartbeat racing like a hummingbird's wings, a false memory his vampire self places on the hazy images of her that swim into his mind.

When he thinks of her, he thinks of all the children they lost, and so much blood washed out of her sheets, so much blood gushing out of her; and of their son, too soon lost; and sometimes at the memory a tear of his own blood - or more truthfully blood stolen from something or someone else - slips down his cheek and splashes the page of the book before him.

Bianca had small hands, and a small waist, and he had wanted to gather her up and protect her from the world, he had wanted her for his own. He had watched her as she heaved water from the well or bent over to pull vegetables from the dry earth and he had felt such a tender welling of love at the way these simple motions seemed to take so much out of her, at how she struggled.

When they made love, she whimpered as if overcome, and he held her thin wrists in his fists and thought about sucking on the skin of her neck to bloom a bruise, but never did because he knew it would not be fair for her to walk around so marked, mauled by him, that people at church would talk.

And even when she lost her children, the children he put inside of her, he would still lay with her, still find himself looming over her smaller form, trying to be gentle, trying not to hurt her, but hurting her anyway in the end by giving her another child to lose.

 

 

When she was lost, he seemed to take her fragility into himself, as if by starving himself, by working so hard that the world would darken at the edges and he would teeter in place, he could bring her back to him, in some kind of penance.

And when he fell from the scaffolding onto the stones above her grave, and the grave of his son, as if he could perform some sacrifice to bring them back, he remembers lying there broken and weeping, a bundle of bones clinging to life.

And then Ysabeau turned him into the furthest thing from fragile, and as a vampire, a _manjasang_ , the whole world of warmbloods became fragile to him.

 

 

It is some irony that Gerbert had thought to make Juliette into his perfect partner, accomplished, glittering with life and intelligence, but it had been the nerviness, the quiver of anxiety, the brittle soul of her that Gerbert had tortured into being, that he was attracted to, that really drew him in.

Sometimes he would pause upon leaving a room to glance back and see her breath shake, her hands reach out for something to grasp, because his leaving had brought forth her inner fears, her memories of Gerbert leaving her so many times in the dark cells where he broke her, and more often than not, the tenderness Matthew felt had him rushing back into the room to take her into his arms once more.

And when he put his mouth to her cunt and held her slim wrists by her sides, she would writhe and buck and make the noises of prey, and it would drive him wild. Her limbs were delicate, her neck elegant, her breasts no larger than his palms; and he liked the way she shook when she reached climax, the way she sometimes clutched at her own hair, the mass of dark curls that spilled luxuriously across each pillow of each bed in each castle and grand house they called home.

He had thought of her as soft, frail, and thus had forgotten that brittle things can snap, that vampires are never truly fragile, and did not foresee that when he tried to leave her for good she would turn crazed and violent.

He had blamed himself, for on some level he had known that she was weak but had taken up with her and left her anyway, and thus he followed her, watched her from the shadows trying to keep her safe, another penance to add to his many others.

He lost sight of her - wilfully, accidentally? - during the First World War, when the earth of Europe, of his home, was sodden with blood, when there was so much extravagant death that even the worst of his kind were brought to weeping.

Her reappearance now when he has taken up with another woman, when he feels himself falling in love again, is a reminder of his sins, as if she is a fury come to haunt him.

 

 

When he drank from warmbloods, over the years and centuries, was he not drawn to frailty too? To nervous, fluttering hearts and nervous, tremulous smiles of women who teetered on thin heeled shoes, or hurried through the streets clutching shawls around their shoulders, smelling of tears, their lips bitten red from their own anxious teeth.

Warmbloods were delicate creatures but even when the women he chose to lay with - once and never more than that, remembering Eleanor - and to drink from, were far from slim; with heaving bosoms, and fleshy hips that quivered in his grip, soft stomachs that he lay his head on as they stroked their fingers through his hair; it seemed he always did choose those who were the most delicate - nervous of spirit, frail of constitution, filled with a desperate need to please and be loved that overtook their own self-preservation.

Opera girls and heiresses, washer-women and widows, harlots and actresses.

There were fragile men through the years of course too, men he drew like moths to a flame, men who thought they saw in him the same reason for distancing themselves from society, men he sometimes drank from, men who, despite all their loveliness, the elegant shape of their wrists, their narrow waists, their arched necks, could never stir more than his blood.

 _You leave a trail of male hearts behind, you two_ , Miriam likes to say archly when they meet in public for a drink - of wine - and she catches sight of the newest heartbroken fool glancing across the pub at Matthew, at Marcus, at both of them.

 _Like you don't?_ Marcus replies one afternoon and she scoffs. _Not anymore, I scare them now._

 _It's the wrinkles_ , Marcus mocks, leaning forward, eyes glittering, and she slaps his hand on the table hard enough that were he human she would have pulverised every bone.

 _Ouch_ , he pouts, and sucks his fingers, as a large man smelling of beer and fear coughs nervously and shuffles to a table further away.

 

 

Miriam is delicate of feature, her eyes catlike, her body unfashionably underfed in some of the eras they have both lived through, and that has drawn the attention of many men who, like Matthew, are drawn to fragile things, though her vicious tongue and force of personality soon put paid to their affections.

In the aftermath of her grief at the loss of her husband, who gave his life to save Matthew from execution a thousand years ago, Miriam trembled with pain, with a deep sorrow and a fear at a future without Bertrand, even though she presented herself as only angry, bitter and furious with Matthew.

It had been Bertrand who had made her swear to continue his chosen path, to stand by Matthew's side and protect him. If his dearest friend had known Matthew as well as he thought he did, if he had known what was to come, would he have made her do it? Perhaps not.

Of course Matthew took her to bed, of course the centuries with her by his side, beautiful and lovely; the years of observing the momentary swells of grief, the tremor of her hands when she smelled something or saw something that reminded her of her mate; those handful of times she spoke in hushed, raw tones after days that shook even vampire constitutions - massacres of warmbloods, apocalyptical earthquakes and city-wide fires, murders of their own kind - about her fears and doubts, the way her small hand felt in his at those moments, the quiver of her voice—of course all this did its work upon his desires.

Perhaps it had been inevitable ever since he had found her in the aftermath of Bertrand's murder, the tears of blood soaking down her face, her soul fluttering in her chest as if she might die of the grief, perhaps he had wanted her since that moment and was only biding the years.

When they had made love, when they had fucked, in hotels and alleyways and palace bedrooms and under cover of darkness in parks and woodlands, in corners of masked balls and in royal boxes, she had liked to ride him, to dig her nails into his shoulders, and he had liked to scrape her neck with his teeth, to clutch at her hips so tightly it made her whine and flutter around him, to grab at her wrists at the moment of her climax and feel her body go slack and vulnerable.

 _I'm not what you want_ , she said to him on their last night together, _and you are not who I want. A part of me will hate you and blame you forever for what you did, you should have died, you know that. I can smell the guilt on you and I grow tired of it._

 _What use is guilt,_ she had continued, sitting in his lap on the balcony of their home in Italy, the cicadas in the hills making their mournful song, and squeezing her hands around his neck tightly as he stared at her guilelessly, _you wallow in it like it is perfume, like you enjoy it. It's self-indulgent._

 _Just as you enjoy grief?_ he had replied and she had scratched his face and pushed him off the balcony and onto the jagged rocks below and then, the next morning, helped him pick the small stones out of the healing skin of his back, in a motion utterly devoid of any romantic intimacy, as if they were only fellow animals.

The attraction of Miriam had surely been that she was not fragile, not really, not like Eleanor had been. And he lies to himself if he thinks it was only Miriam's grief that played a part in their relationship after Jerusalem. What about his own grief, his own loss after Eleanor's death there?

Philippe had told him that he stunk of guilt too, that he was soft and sick of heart, that he was a poor son. That had been after he was made, after he had tried to give his life for his wife and son.

How much worse Philippe had thought of him after Jerusalem. _So you killed her_ , Philippe had said baldly, cruelly, _and now you wallow in your grief and shame like a worm_ , and Matthew had dug angry nails into his own fists so hard he left a trail of blood on the rushes as he walked away.

 

 

Eleanor had been pale, like Bianca, and slim like Miriam, nervous like Juliette could be. She had been beautiful and learned, highborn and fascinated with the world, fascinated with him.

She had been human, vulnerable. Sometimes he would watch her sleep and hold a cold finger on her wrist to hear how her pulse fluttered, lie on his side and watch the quiver of her chest as she breathed.

And when she caught a slight chill and he was reminded of the plague that killed his wife and son, she had not understood his fear, his fraught anger at her for leaving the palace on a jaunt two days hence even if it was in a closed litter, for venturing outside to the world that might easily kill her; but she had still let herself be bathed by him in hot water, washed and dried and bundled in many layers of blankets, watching him with nervous eyes, mute under his forceful wishes.

She remained a virgin, though he touched her all the same, used his mouth on her, held her down and made her whimper with pleasure, her pale chest flushing red with her desperate pleasure.

She wanted him to drink from her but he never did, never drew any of her blood until the day he killed her accidentally in the midst of his confrontation with Baldwin, as the sands of the desert screamed through gaps in the shutters of the palace they stood inside, as the sun heated the city outside to burning and the scent of blood from that day's clashes shimmered underneath all the other scents.

It is his curse to remember everything, to remember how her body looked, lifeless and broken, to remember what her blood looked like on his hands.

This is what comes from loving fragile things, a voice had whispered in his head, this is what comes from thinking yourself above god, above punishment.

 

 

And now here he is again, falling in love with another warmblood, as he swore he would never do. Here he is attempting to shelter another human body from the world, and himself.

Diana was nervous the day they first met in the library, when her powers slipped out of her as easy as breathing. But she lifted her chin stubbornly as they talked, accused him of being a vampire, and he could smell the power in her just as he could smell her blood singing to him.

She is powerful, all agree to that, more powerful than any have been for centuries, she thrums with it, she _glows_ with it, and he tells his mother it is her bravery that he is drawn to, but is she not also prey, is she not also fragile? Has he not carried her like a damsel in distress, tucked her into bed with her heart weak and racing, shielded her from those come to harm her? Has he not felt her body sway and slacken when he kisses her, when he holds her face in his hands and moves her as he wishes?

She has a modern sensibility about sex, she does not expect to be the one who is taken, who lies back and is gifted pleasure according to the whims of her partner, she reaches out to touch him with eager hands.

But it is still the moments when he has her under him, when he holds her wrists down and her adrenaline ticks upwards, that please him the most.

She is not willowy like some of his women have been, not swathed in jewels and silks with a quivering fan in her hand covering a blushing face. She is stubborn, and wilful, she argues with him and does not listen to his advice.

But her breath still catches like all of theirs did when he kisses the paper-thin skin of her wrist and feels the pulse of her blood on his lips, holding her palm firmly between his fingers, keeping her in place with the barest whisper of his strength.

 

 

When Juliette tries to kill him, when he loses so much blood that he swears he can hear the tremulous glimmering sound of some kind of afterlife drawing him forwards, Diana saves him and offers him her blood. He hears her say afterwards how she had had to force him to drink her, but that is a lie, she does not know how easy it was to come close to draining her, to give in.

She does not understand her frailty, nor what she has done tying her life to his, the danger she now faces from both the world and himself.

True strength would have been to deny him at the first, but then did he ever really give her a chance? He has honed his hunting skills, and his desires, over centuries, and she is so young, so warm and fleeting, so fragile.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> please comment if you found your way here and enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! :)
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise-fics](http://framboise-fics.tumblr.com)


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